


love; in search for the cholera

by harajukucrepes



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe: Set in Seoul, Anyway Sicheng is a professor and Yuta is a hairstylist and things happen, Heavy literary reference so please refer to notes, Jaehyun is a cameo in this, M/M, Mentions of Korean pop culture and whatnot, Slice of Life, Stream of Consciousness, Yuta has a very dreamlike thought process in this, Yuto too, mentions of diseases as metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:13:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25804192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harajukucrepes/pseuds/harajukucrepes
Summary: You see, Sicheng concluded, I was the one who was born sick and you were the one who had been born knowing how to love.
Relationships: Dong Si Cheng | WinWin/Nakamoto Yuta
Comments: 9
Kudos: 32
Collections: Yuta Fic Fest 2019-2020





	love; in search for the cholera

**Author's Note:**

> \- the original prompt is:  
> a soul of china meets a soul of japan within the night light of seoul, south korea
> 
> \- tbh I had planned on something far longer but I lost my muse somewhere and couldn't finish in time so I restarted to make sure that its length is manageable and I could still make it to the deadline  
> \- therefore I apologise in advance if this is not up to expectation, kindly forgive ;;;  
> \- this piece has heavy elements of these two books, so it would be a bonus if you're familiar with them  
> 1) [Love in the time of cholera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_in_the_Time_of_Cholera) \- which you might notice also inspired the title of this piece. Long story short, a guy met a girl in a port city in Colombia and they both fell in love but the girl married another man and the guy spent the rest of his life pining after her by having many many many many affairs. There's also a spoiler for the ending of this book in this.  
> 2) [The Alchemist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_\(novel\)) \- long story short a shepherd boy went on a journey to discover treasures after having a prophecy  
> 3) [A little life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Life) \- this book only makes a cameo nothing much 
> 
> \- thank you so much for reading, all feedbacks are welcomed

*

love; in search for the cholera

*

  
  
  
  
  


It started—and would later end—with an umbrella, or the lack thereof. 

He remembers it being a heavily rainy night in the middle of summer because the lights were scant, obscured by the downpour and worsened by his rain-soaked glasses, and there was also the remote scent of the rewarmed pastries from Tous Les Jours behind him. He thought he had seen an angel of some sorts, because the stranger was wearing bright white and the last thing he had seen before having his glasses knocked away from his face was the sharp, pointy ear belonging to the said stranger who disappeared once he put his glasses back, right before having a passing car splash a puddle of rainwater to his feet. 

But to his disappointment he had not seen an angel, just someone who didn’t have an umbrella to prepare for a sudden rainfall because Sicheng was just another person among the thousands who walked on the streets Hongdae daily that he could have easily passed by for a thousand times over and yet if it wasn’t because of that midsummer night rain, they wouldn’t have met each other, wouldn’t have started exchanging book recommendations, wouldn’t have started having meals together, wouldn’t have started spending nights together. 

And so maybe, Yuta thinks, that was when he started appreciating the rainy days. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It started with Paulo Coelho—or the clashing opinions they both had for his works. 

Sicheng didn’t say it outright but Yuta could tell that he despised the protagonist of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s _Love In The Time of Cholera_ because he kept mum for a few days after having finished the book. At first he had only sighed, ranting in low voices about how it wasn’t worth the money he spent shipping it all the way from Shanghai to Seoul. I even paid extra to have the next-day delivery, he whined, and it was all because you said it was good. 

“I said it was interesting,” Yuta grinned, “I never said it was good.” The exact description he had used was “profoundly addictive” which he wrote using Kanji to express it to Sicheng because he didn’t know how to say it in Korean and yet some misinterpretation still happened, because a shared language can only do so much when the nuances that really gave meaning to his words drifted below the translated parts unnoticed. 

Sicheng could only roll his eyes even as he provided his scholarly review of the book, saying that it was objectively a near-perfect piece of literature in that it made perfect use of words and perfect use of linguistic elegance and so perfectly structured that it was one of the most evocative things he had ever read. 

“But?” Yuta asked, because it was such a Sicheng thing to do, lavishing praises on things he loathed because sarcasm had always been his favourite weapon to be used in acts of condemnation and based on how prudent he had been with Yuta, Sicheng probably hadn’t gotten much chance to have his method of choice questioned while in Korea. 

“Well, I said it,” Sicheng replied hastily. 

“You don’t like it, do you?”

“You don’t have to like a book to read it,” Sicheng snapped and Yuta wondered if their vastly different opinion on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez classic was influenced by the language they read the book in, Yuta reading it in Japanese and Sicheng reading it Chinese because both of them weren’t confident enough to read it in Korean. 

Sicheng refused to comment any further but he gave in a few days later and explained that he couldn’t relate to the promiscuous protagonist at all and couldn’t help but sympathise with all the women he had encountered because he just couldn’t “understand” it. “If love was that “enduring”,” he had said, emphasising the word _enduring_ with an inverted comma hand gesture, “why didn’t he stay celibate, why must he go through all of that, why didn’t he just take the hint already that the “love of his life” never really loved him?” 

It was then that Yuta learned about the true power of apathy, because he had hoped to be able to discuss the way corrupted forms of romantic love often take the shapes of diseases in literary works, but he must had started off a little too strong with this recommendation and part of him was wondering if it was because he wanted Sicheng to read something that would definitely repulse him the way Yuta had found Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist off-putting because reading it made him feel like he was being constantly preached. This definitely must had been his intention after all, because he finally heaved a contented sigh when Sicheng jokingly extorted a replica of an Olympic medal out from him because he felt like he needed to be given one just for finishing _Love In The Time of Cholera_. 

Yuta didn’t think he would live to ever see this, but apparently even language professors have literary dealbreakers. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It started because of an up-and-coming actor—or Yuta’s late immersion into the Korean Drama craze. 

“What do you mean _up-and-coming_ ,” Sicheng was saying like it offended him royally that Yuta didn’t know anything about this Jung Jaehyun guy they saw in a new Kdrama trailer while shopping in Myeongdong, because according to Sicheng, Jung Jaehyun was _everywhere_ and he was so _everywhere_ that he was in his students’ mouths, their phonecases, their essays whenever they had to give a name to their characters, his roommate’s wall posters, his favourite brand of grape juice, his Netflix recommendations, the Melon OST charts—so literally how, Sicheng asked, did he escape your field of vision, especially considering what your job is?

All Yuta could really say was that the last Korean actor whose work he had at least followed was Bae Yong Joon and the others he had met at his job were just a series of extraordinarily lovely faces who mostly worked in entertainment and Sicheng reacted to the revelation the same way he reacted when Yuta told him that he didn’t like games at all—in complete and utter disbelief. 

Yet in spite of that, Yuta found himself religiously following _Winter in June_ and scheduling drama binging sessions at Sicheng’s apartment because not only was watching Jung Jaehyun an extremely visually pleasing experience (much to Sicheng’s chagrin, Yuta could imagine, because try as he might to hide his displeasure, Yuta still saw those phantom winces from the corner of his eyes whenever he gushed about the actor), the plot happened to be really engaging and Yuta swore that he hadn’t seen a better love story since _Your Name_. By the end of the drama, Yuta couldn’t help but lean against Sicheng’s shoulder as he wept for the fate of the star-crossed lovers, especially affected by the way parts of Jung Jaehyun’s face went red in sorrow as he bid his lover goodbye, knowing that they were never meant to be together.

Yuta would have thought that Sicheng would be finally feel elated in being able to coax him into having his mind changed about something he used to be mostly uninterested in, but his silent indifference towards Yuta’s obsession only made Yuta’s confusion louder and he had never felt this lost ever since he landed on Gimpo and had no idea on how to reach his temporary accommodation in Dongdae-mun. 

It was only a few weeks after the drama finale that Sicheng revealed to him during a dinner in a restaurant playing an episode of _Running Man_ with Jung Jaehyun that he wasn’t intending to be cold or dismissive about his newfound interest, he just didn’t know how to deal with the fact that Yuta had a _type_. 

“What do you mean I have a _type_ ,” Yuta had laughed, because it was such an extraordinarily trivial reason to give him the cold shoulder for weeks that it seemed a little absurd for someone as gentle as Sicheng but also made sense in the most Sicheng way possible. 

“Well,” Sicheng argued, “I wouldn’t have imagined that you’d be obsessed with an _actor_.” 

“I’m within my rights to be obsessed with anything,” Yuta rebuked, more than happy to flex his improved Korean to debate with Sicheng because after all, his swift mastery in the language had been something like a source of pride for Sicheng. 

“And I’m within my rights to be judgemental too,” Sicheng snarked both in his amusement and half-mock-confrontational, because theirs was a story he loved telling his students—a Chinese language professor in Korea meeting a famed Japanese hairstylist in Seoul and both of them achieving Korean language proficiency by pretty much being in a 2-person book club—and he would make every moment into an anecdote to prove that any two people, no matter how different or how distinct from each other, could meet in the middle. 

“Why would you be judging my obsession with an actor,” Yuta scoffed, “my admiration for faces is but an occupational hazard.” 

(Truth be told, thinking back, he didn’t know why he wasn’t prouder of himself for being able to say _occupational hazard_ in Korean.)

“Yea but why him?”

“Why can’t it be him?”

Sicheng refused to answer and elected to instead continue to keep gobbling up _dak-galbi_ , but Yuta felt like he had a pretty good guess: 

That Sicheng somewhat resented Jung Jaehyun because he had been stealing his students’ attention. 

Yuta imagined that it would be tough navigating his job in the middle of the so-called Jung Jaehyun fever and it was right after parting that day that Yuta realised that it was _Love In The Time of Cholera_ all over with the symbolisms escaping him yet again despite drowning in it probably because he hadn’t expected Yuta to also have contracted the cholera named Jung Jaehyun as well. 

It was only much later that he would really realised—when they kissed in the middle of a basketball field near the Gangnam River—that Sicheng also contracted his own cholera that had nothing to do with Jung Jaehyun. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It all began because of Yokohama—specifically, a postcard of Cosmos Clock 21 Ferris Wheel sent to Yuta by his model friend Yuto and he accidentally admitted to Sicheng that no, he hadn’t been to Tokyo ever since that one time he went to visit his mother’s elementary school classmate with his family. 

“Wow,” Sicheng had exclaimed. From what Yuta had been told, Sicheng had pretty much divided his life into 3 parts depending on where he was residing: Wenzhou from birth till middle school, then Beijing from high school until finishing his PhD, and now, in Seoul and solidifying his career as an esteemed linguistics scholar. 

“Yes,” Yuta explained, suddenly wondering if it was weird for him to have never been much of a Tokyo person, “Osaka had pretty much everything.” 

Yuta had been ecstatic when his saloon received an assignment to style for a fashion event jointly organised by some of the biggest brands in both Korea and Japan where he became fast friends with Yuto. I have never met anyone like him around here, he had gushed to Sicheng, and he said he had never met someone like me too. 

Sicheng reacted with a conspicuous eye-roll before agreeing in the most noncommittal tone Yuta had ever heard coming out from his mouth. 

“Yeah, sure,” he had said. “The way every _friendship_ began with _I have never met someone like you_.” 

At this point Yuta could only laugh at Sicheng’s tendencies to make it seem like Yuta could grow obsessed with anyone tall and handsome and deep-voiced, something that had been a stubborn prevalence ever since Yuta admitted to having some sort of celebrity crush on the actor named Jung Jaehyun. Yuta sometimes jokingly retaliated by reminding Sicheng about all the students who would take pictures of him outside campus like they were his personal fansites and the way he once ended up headlining an anonymous blog post on Pann because some of his guest students were too shocked by his handsomeness. 

But then he received not just one Yokohama postcard from Yuto, but also a postcard of the Great Buddha in Kamakura, another one of the Tokyo Tower and then they just kept coming from all over Japan and Yuta couldn’t even deny that he was a little touched by the enduring gesture and felt like this might be what it felt to be contracting the same kind of cholera because when a sickness persisted without an effective medication, bodily functions were bound to start failing. 

This time it wasn’t just admiring some face on the screen like how he had felt for Jung Jaehyun, but harbouring some idolatry for Yuto’s tenacity and part of him did feel like he was doomed anyway and for a while, he thought he knew what he would say to convince Sicheng again to re-read _Love In The Time of Cholera,_ this time maybe, he would plead, think of me as the protagonist you used to hate, the one whom you had despised for disguising promiscuity as some form of sickness, because I’m now having it too—and maybe, probably, perhaps, the real sickness is not love but an aching desire to be filled with something other than loneliness. 

Sicheng closed the book he was reading at that time in the cafe and gestured for the bill, then said one of the harshest thing Yuta had ever heard: 

“You’re not a Florentino Ariza,” Sicheng had said decisively, his face showing signs of increasing impatience, “because you haven’t found your Fermina Daza.”

If Yuta’s occupational hazard had caused him to grow random admirations for beautiful faces and the kind hearts that sometimes came with them, Sicheng’s occupational hazard caused him to never forget a book once he had read it, no matter how much he had loathed the characters that had occupied the prose. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It was something initiated by Sicheng on gloomy Sunday afternoon in winter—specifically, Yuta’s least preferred weather to have sex on and it was such an inconvenient thing too, because Sicheng had never made love to a man before and Yuta had only ever been fucked by men and they could have just gone through all of these without ever breaching that thinly-defined boundary and yet Sicheng insisted that they should, because why not. 

“I’m your type too, you see,” Sicheng had said, his face stern and determined and for a fleeting moment Yuta thought he knew what his students had worshipped him for. “First, I’m taller than you.” 

Yuta remembers being so shocked that he could hardly suppress a giggle as Sicheng held him by his waist and nibbled softly at his ear and he had no choice but to nudge him to continue. 

“Apparently I’m very handsome,” Sicheng went on and Yuta took this chance to cup his chin and shower kisses on his long, elegant neck. 

“Yes, I suppose you are,” Yuta whispered back. “And?”

“And my voice is very deep,” Sicheng said, his voice softened deliberately into a baritone that sent an electric current under Yuta’s skin. 

“And?”

“I don’t know,” Sicheng said, pinning him to the couch in front of his television and pressed the remote control to turn on the heater. “What else do you like?”

And so Yuta let Sicheng kiss him as he listed down every attribute that he thought Yuta would like in a man and Yuta let himself be carried into a fictional universe where everyone was born sick at birth and they would have to spend the rest of their lives finding people to be sick together and his mind began merging that fictional universe with the reality that he had experienced with Sicheng: that raining night in Hongdae and then a few more rainy nights after before they formally introduced themselves to each other and Yuta gave Sicheng a name card for when he would like a free haircut; the few more haircuts that they took before Sicheng asked him about the doorstopper he had on the counter (it was the Japanese translation of _A Little Life_ , ironically a work by an American author of _Japanese_ descent named Hanya Yanagihara) and if Yuta would recommend for him (Yuta had said no, because he was only halfway through it and was already struggling to muster the motivation to keep reading because of the absolute bleakness of the novel—which made his decision to recommend _Love In The Time of Cholera_ later to Sicheng an act of supreme hypocrisy); the many meals they took together with Sicheng taking lead in constantly correcting Yuta’s Korean for being the more formally trained between them; the many shopping trips that they took together in Myeongdong because they were both craving for signs of home, even if commercialised and that fateful day where Yuta found the love of his life as he watched the trailer with the actor he had had a crush on; the many times they held hands while walking in the middle of the night alongside the lights illuminating the lightly grassy path they walked on; the many times their eyes met and they knew that this thing between them was special, this sickness they both had was special and even if Sicheng had never knew what kind of love that the protagonist of _Love In The Time of Cholera_ had endured as he went through lovers after lovers and perhaps never finding a cure despite ending up with his lady love because even if Yuta didn’t meet a real angel like he thought he did on that rainy night in midsummer, the magic was alive and within their souls. 

And then Sicheng kissed him again and again, sometimes deep and passionate and sometimes light and fluffy, but he carried with him the kind of spell that wouldn’t have been conjured if Yuta had been anyone but himself and so, Yuta declared, it was time to put a rest to _Love In The Time of Cholera._

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It refused to end with an umbrella—or lack thereof, because Sicheng’s screaming voice was muffled by the violent downpour as Yuta took him for a tiny spin in the middle of the road in the middle of the night and then Yuta grabbed Sicheng for a kiss because their spell was still working and because he was now determined to live his own sickness-ridden life in search for a cure and because it started with rain and therefore it had to be re-started with another bout of rain and if Sicheng may, would he come along with the ride?

Sicheng kissed him back and Yuta knew that he must had been calling him crazy but then it was because they were both a little crazy at that time as the symptoms started smiting them both and Yuta was just trying to borrow the powers of the rainfall to wash the dread plaguing them as they realised that there were two hours between Seoul and Osaka and five hours between Beijing and Seoul but six hours between Beijing and Osaka and almost seven hours between Wenzhou and Osaka and somehow the universe had planned for them to meet in the middle of their homes so that they could find some time to be sick together and decide when to find a cure. 

And then Yuta stopped spinning just at the right time to be feeling a trickle of warmth down his cheeks because Sicheng didn’t want to let him go and Yuta made a soft promise by reminding him of something that Paolo Coelho said in the book he had treasured so much. 

“When you are loved,” he whispered, knowing that Sicheng would find a way to hear him, “there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you.”

Then Sicheng held him tight and returned a promise of his own. 

“Love is a natural talent,” he said, “you are either born knowing how or you never know.” 

Yuta held Sicheng back and waited for his cure. 

You see, Yuta, Sicheng concluded. I was the one who was born sick—

There it is, Yuta thinks. There. 

—and you were the one who had been born knowing how to love. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It didn’t end with an umbrella or the lack thereof, of course it didn’t because why should it, Yuta thinks as the plane takes off. 

A good literature starts with the author’s words and ends only when the reader decides it would be and that’s how Yuta declares to Sicheng that he’ll be back, he’ll remember Sicheng and his little pesky literary dealbreakers and his selective ignorances of his students’ more intense affection and when that time comes, he promises himself. 

I’ll find us another book to live in. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

**Author's Note:**

> \- again thank you so much for enduring this, you're my hero


End file.
